After App-V 4 showed occasional problems with folder redirection, therefor such a scenario wasn’t initially supported in App-V 5. As that turned out to be not the best choice either, SP2 for App-V 5 (re) introduced support for folder redirection – but also introduced some problems.

Before we start diving into it:

=====================================

IMPORTANT: If you are using App-V 5 together with Folder Redirection, it is mandatory to have Roaming Profiles or another solution that saves & restores Registry information. Any other configuration is not supported!

=====================================

As most application store their settings in the Registry, the following problem is unveiled never or very late.

Example:

A user launches Notepad++ ('NPP'). Folder Redirection is enabled for AppdataRoaming and Roaming Profiles are in place for the Registry.

The user launches NPP and changes the language from German (Deutsch) to English:

[image]

NPP’s configuration XML gets stored by App-V underneath LocalAppdata:

[image]

When NPP gets closed, the compressed ZIP file containing the XML gets written back to Appdata [Note by Falko: roaming, redirected; the App-V client does that]:

[image]

Opening the XML inside the ZIP shows the right language settings:

[image]

In theory NPP should launch with an English UI when it is launched for the next time. But this doesn’t happen.

[Note by Falko: the following short paragraph is a clarification of the original statement. Not Sebastian, but I am responsible for it. However I backed it up ]

The reason is that upon the next logon the (local) appdata folder gets created with a new time stamp – while App-V stored the ‘old’ timestamp in the Registry (and that Registry value was stored and restored by the User Profile solution)

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftAppVClientPackages<GUID>AppDataTime

At user logon it appears to the App-V client that the folder’s time stamp is newer than the one in the Registry – so the folder content gets dropped.

Normally, deleting these user keys [Note by Falko: at the right time] should help avoiding the problem, but there are situations where this isn’t enough: Also some machine keys (HKLM) may have to be cleaned up.

H. Wälchli was so kind to provide a sample script that does all the required clean-ups:

[script]

Thanks a lot for that!

Conclusion by Falko:

It is essential to use a User Profile Management solution along with App-V. In the scenario of Folder Redirection for AppData it should be configured to delete or ignore the ‘timestamp’ values in both, HKCU and HKLM.